What was claimed
A PPE shipment was destroyed at the Port of Dover after illegal immigrants were found travelling alongside it.
Our verdict
There is no evidence this happened, and the authorities at the port say the claims are false.
There’s no evidence immigrants caused a PPE shipment to be destroyed at Dover
5 May 2020
We’ve been asked by readers to check stories circulating on Facebook claiming that a shipment of personal protective equipment (PPE) had to be destroyed at Dover docks last month after undocumented immigrants were found hiding alongside it.
We’ve found no evidence that this ever happened or that any PPE has been seized or destroyed for this reason at Dover since the outbreak began. A Home Office spokesperson told us: “These claims are totally false”.
There have been more general reports of people at Dover who’ve been found to have entered the country illegally during the lockdown, and Dover is usually a hotspot on the south coast for this kind of activity, but nothing that links any of this to the seizure or destruction of PPE shipments.
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This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because there’s no evidence this happened and the authorities concerned confirmed it isn’t true.